SOUTHERN LIGHTS: Violent gang’s disenchantment resonates today

Sunday

Oct 9, 2011 at 12:01 AM

It’s funny, and a little terrifying, how a conflict in an obscure patch of the world can affect so many people — in fact, generations and generations of them.I’m not talking now about Afghanistan or Iraq or Serbia. I’m talking about a place in our own backyard, the section of rural Clarke County called “the Mitcham Beat.”It was there that a group of murderous young men, calling themselves “The Hell-at-the-Breech Gang,” assembled in the late 1800s to wage war on the bankers, merchants and politicians that they believed were ruining their lives.War isn’t too strong a term, either. The conflict that they helped to spark is still known as “The Mitcham War.” It saw shootings, lynchings, ambushes, beatings and violence of almost every stripe.In turn, a group of vigilantes, some as bloodthirsty and wild as the Hell-at-the-Breech Gang, rode roughshod into Mitcham Beat to fight fire with fire.It was hellish. A Mobile newspaper described the Mitcham Beat, which lies southwest of Thomasville and north of Coffeeville, as “Clarke County’s Criminal Colony.”The violence was quelled, but the image stuck. Jerry Elijah Brown, a 66-year-old writer and a Mitcham Beat native, wants to change things.His new book, “Alabama’s Mitcham Wars: Essaying Mortal Wounds,” has drawn praise from Harper Lee, who called it the greatest work to come out of Alabama since her own “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Former UA President David Mathews also gives the book high praise. “Forget ‘Gone With the Wind.’ This is the real South,” he writes.Columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson, a 1977 graduate of Auburn University, where Brown taught journalism, cites the book’s “lovely language.”She especially likes Brown’s description of a mantel clock as “gaudy and grotesque with its ornamented glass face and topknot facade and Roman numerals” that “clear[ed] its throat at five minutes before the short hand gets to VII ...”That is fine writing, indeed.But if it has beautiful passages, Brown’s book also seems a bit odd. It’s part family and county history, part philosophical and part bitter riposte against those who used too broad a brush to describe Mitcham Beat as a nest of criminals. Sometimes the parts mesh well, but at others they seem to mingle uneasily.Yet much of the book is brilliant. Brown raises questions of what constitutes poverty, what justifies revenge and, ultimately, what defines good and evil.Unfortunately, in his defense of Mitcham Beat, Brown seems to give short shrift to Tom Franklin’s “Hell at the Breech,” a powerful novel about the Mitcham Wars first published in 2003.Like Brown, Franklin, an acclaimed novelist, is a native of the area. In the new book, Brown calls him “Tommy Franklin.” Whether it’s simple familiarity or a deliberate attempt to belittle Franklin, I don’t know. But he makes the point several times that Franklin’s novel is a work of fiction. Just fiction.Still, Brown’s book is an eye-opener, particularly for those of us who grew up with the warning to steer clear of Mitcham Beat. Note that the title of his book refers to “The Mitcham Wars.” The battles aren’t over.Not everyone in the area approved of the gang, he writes. Far from it. His own family was standoffish. And the area’s many Civil War veterans, who had witnessed more than enough violence and bloodshed to last a lifetime, generally gave a cold shoulder to Hell-at-the-Breech, he writes.The gang, at heart, was a group of dispossessed young men, angry at the profiteering “establishment.” Their disenchantment resonates in today’s “Occupy Wall Street” movement.Brown writes that the vigilantes were just as bad as the gang. He describes them as a “mob” and details the violence they did to Mitcham Beat residents, including victims who were totally innocent.Brown and Franklin — opposite sides of the coin — praise historian Hardy Jackson, who wrote the first scholarly study of the Mitcham War. Jackson says one of the roots of the conflict was “general meanness.”An editor of his book told him that the phrase was too vague for a scholarly study.“I started to reply that if he’d go with me to Charlie’s Chicken Shack on Old Line Road on a Friday to watch the just-paid pulpwood workers get drunk and settle scores, I’d show him general meanness a-plenty, but I didn’t,” Jackson wrote in a newspaper column. “I just removed the reason and wrote around it. Historians do that.”Yet if there was meanness, there also was compassion.My family may have been involved in the Mitcham War. According to family history, my grandfather, Jim Tucker, was among the vigilantes who rode into the Mitcham Beat. Afterward, his brother Foscue hid him for two weeks in an attic to keep him from being taken before a grand jury.I don’t know if that story is true. According to another family tale, Foscue owed his very name — an unusual one — to the Mitcham War.According to the story, a 16-year-old with ties to Hell-at-the-Breech headed for Coffeeville with plans to murder John Foscue, a merchant there.But word leaked out, and on the way, the teenager was shot and killed in an ambush. Or perhaps he fell dead from disease. No matter. Everyone knew what he’d been up to.The boy’s mother wanted to give him a proper burial, so she sent for my great-grandfather. But he was a circuit-riding Baptist minister who lived in Nanafalia and was far away at the time.The residents of Coffeeville weren’t about to officiate at the funeral. The boy’s mother was in despair.Then someone suggested that she ask John Foscue to conduct the service.Stunned, she said she couldn’t. But someone else asked, and the merchant agreed. The teenager got a proper burial.My great-grandfather, the circuit rider, was greatly impressed. He called the Coffeeville merchant’s decision the greatest act of Christian forgiveness that he’d ever known, and he said that if he ever had another son, he would name him for John Foscue. That was a promise he kept when my great-uncle was born.Again, I don’t know if the story is true, but perhaps there’s something to it. Brown mentions a mission against Foscue and in a coda to his book, Franklin fictionalizes it.Nobody is all bad or all good. Lights and shadows chase each other, sometimes intertwine, across the landscape. As Mathews says, Brown’s new book may reflect “the real South,” but the lessons are universal.

Ben Windham is retired editorial editor of The Tuscaloosa News. His email address is Swind15443@aol.com.

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